they have, and how can the child escape being devoured by the parent, or respond to them creatively?
Both my parents had fantasies of being artists of some kind, in writing, theatre, dance. But they were vulnerable emotionally and financially, had few opportunities, and seemed to stew in frustration, particularly as they got older. It was all talk, the dream of a life. They couldn’t take any risks, and since they could afford to give nothing up, nothing was ever accomplished. Confined and restless, I saw I had to take their dreams for reality – and quickly, before I was done for. I liked to read and work; I wasn’t afraid to be alone and I wanted to go far into England, to see what kind of country my father had come to and what we new arrivals would make it into. It was as an artist that I felt most individual, competitive, alive and envious of others’ successes. If we are forged and made in difficulty, writing was a problem I wanted to take on. I barely thought about money or survival or security. We were hippies, and ‘bread’, at first, was never the aim of my very politicised generation, even after the deprivation of the post-war period. However, during the latter part of my lifetime it seems to have been decided that economic productivity and materialism are the ethics of choice, asthe virtuous end of life. Now the teenager might be free sexually, but the neo-liberal project of open-ended economic success makes for scarcity, and for a severe form of insecurity and servitude.
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I had my mirror years, and even fancied myself. For a time I was in love with what I saw. These were the days when everyone had more or less the same body shape. We all ate the same food, did the same amount of exercise at school, and how you looked was either good or bad luck, though as any Teddy boy could tell you, there was sticky stuff you could put in your hair to make you stand out.
Teenagers don’t need to be reminded that wherever they are, their body is with them as an object. Teenagers have always been keen on harming, piercing and marking themselves. Now they go to the gym and shave their bodies and wax their hair; they hyperventilate over blackheads and what they’re eating, and look critically and in wonder at themselves and each other. My boys check other boys’ bodies before they check the girls. In this exile, this period of freedom between loves, hypereroticised, wild hedonists, they can really only love themselves. One day they will look at photographs of their younger selves and be shocked by everything they couldn’t see or appreciate in themselves. And however beautiful they might be, any adult will remember that most of us when youngfelt a lot like Holden Caulfield or Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, awkward, not ready for the world, and disputing with our too-present or too-absent parents, to draw them closer, or push them away.
The age of fifteen to twenty in a kid is tough for a parent, with many cruel exchanges. The art the young are fascinated by – pop, hip-hop, video games, vile jokes, horror films – looks gratuitously sadistic. If they are fortunate enough to be able to develop all their capacities, our children, among other things, will have to become aggressive and even destructive. It is shocking, the way they say ‘fuck you’ all the time and mean it. Their necessary hatred, from the parent’s point of view, seems so final. But it is nothing like the cruelty of adults, and this sudden invasion of the nasty and unkind, of a particularly unpleasant version of reality, is an important break from the past, a form of entry into the grown-up world. The machines the kids prefer to real people – computers, phones, video games – are transitional objects for semi-adults, and function as links between life stages.
But there is something else at this time, equally violent or shocking in its own way, a shock which perhaps never diminishes, and which pornography inadequately reproduces but also
Angel Payne, Victoria Blue